Who can I count on: Honor, self-reliance, and family in the United States and Iran

Honor requires that individuals demonstrate their worth in the eyes of others. However, it is unclear how honor and its implications for behavior vary between societies. Here, we explore the tension between competing views about how to make sense of honor–as narrowly defined through self-reliance and self-defense or as broadly defined through strength of character. The former suggests that demonstrating the ability to defend one’s self, is a crucial component of honor, while the latter allows the centrality of self-reliance to vary depending on circumstances. To examine these implications, we conducted studies in the U.S., where self-reliance is central to honor, and in Iran, where individual agency must be balanced against the interests of kin. Americans (Studies 1, 2a; n = 978) who endorsed honor values tended to ignore governmental COVID-19 measures because they preferred relying on themselves. In contrast, honor-minded Iranians (Study 2b; n = 201) adhered to public-health guidelines and did not prefer self-reliance. Moreover, honor-minded Iranians endorsed family-reliance, but did not moralize self-reliance (Study 3; n = 107), while honor-minded Americans endorsed family-reliance and moralized self-reliance (Study 3; n = 120). Results suggest that local norms may shape how honor is expressed across cultures.

May 24, 2024 Dear Dr. Banerjee, Thank you for the opportunity to revise and resubmit our manuscript, Who Can I Count On: Honor, Self-Reliance, and Family in the United States and Iran.We greatly appreciate your insights, which have been very helpful in improving our manuscript.This letter describes how we addressed the reviewers' feedback.For clarity, we have organized our specific responses to each of your points in the table on the following page.In the revised manuscript, we have kept track-changes on while removing author information, so you can see the exact changes we made.
Overall, we thank the reviewers for their positive and helpful feedback.Reviewer 1 noted issues with the clarity of our paper, and we have incorporated their suggestions in the manuscript.In particular, we made changes to the introduction to more directly align its discussion with our main ideas and elaborate on our understanding of self-reliance.Reviewer 2 generally noted methodological limitations and reminded us that there is substantial cultural heterogeneity in Iran as well, and we have made changes in response to their feedback, particularly in the discussion section.Both Reviewers noted the age difference between our U.S. and Iranian samples, so we re-ran our analyses controlling for age, as well as other demographic variables such as gender and political affiliation.
We think that all of your points were reasonable critiques and have worked to address them in our paper.As a result, we believe that our paper is now clearer in its conceptualization, and we hope we have eased some concerns about the limitations of our studies.Thank you again for the opportunity to revise our paper.We hope that you and the reviewers agree that it is now ready for publication in PLOS ONE.
In addition, we would like to confirm that this work was supported by the Mind and Society Center, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, and the Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.We also moved the ethics statement to the Methods section, selected a new data repository, uploaded the questionnaire on inclusivity, and revised formatting to meet the standards of PLOS ONE.
Thank you for your consideration of our revisions.

Sincerely,
Peter Wang, Ph.D. (on behalf of all authors) Reviewer Feedback Authors' Response Reviewer 1 Writing of the introduction can be improved for clarity.The link between the ideas is not established well and paragraphs lack coherence.
We thank Reviewer 1 for their helpful feedback.We have revised the introduction to focus more directly on the research question at hand and avoid discussion of tangential constructs (pages 2-4).We have also elaborated further on certain points in the introduction to make our conceptualization clearer (pages 4, 6, 7, 12).In their operationalization of self-reliance, authors seem to contrast self-reliance with reliance in the government.This is evidenced by their self-reliance measure: "During this pandemic, instead of relying on official sources, I should trust myself" These two, however, may not be mutually exclusive.One can, for example, have high levels of trust on themselves AND the government.In other words, self-reliance is operationalized to show disobedience to government.Then it is shown to predict lower levels of public health adherence.
Thank you for this suggestion.We considered self-reliance in opposition to dependence on government partly because this has been an important theme in honor research and because governments were a major source of pandemic-related guidelines.To make our understanding of selfreliance explicit, we elaborated further on selfreliance values in the introduction and methods sections (pages 4, 12).In study 4, the mean age of Iranian participants is 21.03, SD = 5.52, range 18-45 while for American participants it is = 40.01,SD = 13.42,range 19-79.This is a big difference and make the interpretation of the results questionable.These two samples comprise people from different generations, potentially with different values and priorities.
We thank Reviewer 1 for noting this important difference in samples' age.We added a discussion of the age difference in the Limitations section (page 30) and controlled for age in every study in our new analyses (pages 14, 18, 21, 25, 27).Study 1-3 study took place during the pandemic.study 4 data collection time in Iran was mid 2022 while it was early 2024 in the US.The results of self-reliance scores, therefore, might be influenced by the salience of disease and Covid health concerns.I suggest replicating the We thank Reviewer 1 for this important comment.We agree that it is important to replicate this work in the post-COVID time as a robustness check.In this revision, we opted not to self-reliance findings in the post-covid time as a robustness check.
collect new data since it is not feasible for our research team to collect new data from Iran at the moment (there are no easy-to-use platforms like MTurk or Prolific in Iran available to researchers outside the country).However, we found differences in honor values in Studies 1-3 despite the ongoing pandemic and the salience of pandemic-related concerns.We think this suggests that, even when we hold pandemic concerns equal, there are still crosscultural differences in the kinds of values that honor endorses.Nevertheless, we think that your point makes sense and we have added it to the Limitations section as something that needs to be addressed in future research (page 31).In study 4, researchers measured self-reliance moralization but not self-reliance itself.On the other hand, they measured family reliance but not family reliance moralization.What is the reason for this inconsistency?Wouldn't it be valuable to measure both types for both constructs?
We thank Reviewer 1 for this comment.In hindsight, there are certain measures that would have been useful to include, but we wanted to avoid administering too many measures, especially since the Iranian sample was not compensated for their time.Since we had tested honor-self-reliance associations previously, we opted to focus on selfreliance moralization.Part of our logic is that an honorbased endorsement of selfreliance values would be included within the moralization of self-reliance -honor would need to treat self-reliance as a moral concern before it can treat it as a moral good.We did not measure family-reliance moralization because we did not think of family-reliance as a personal ideal in the same way that self-reliance could be.We thought of family-reliance as something that was normalized by kinship values, but not something that people are told to strive toward.We have elaborated on familyreliance in the paper to make our conception of it more clear (page 22).The main argument of the paper is not clear in the introduction.My understanding is that selfreliance is argued to be the central theme in the version of honor prevalent in the US South.However, there are other equally important themes in the Iran's version.If this is the case, it needs to be clearly stated in the introduction.
Thank you for the suggestion.We agree and have revised the introduction to present our points more clearly (pages 3-4).
The introduction begins with reputation and then transits rapidly to honor without establishing the link between the two: "Maintaining a good reputation is so vital that honor is arguably one of the three features of human culture [5], affecting how people engage with institutions [6,7] and other groups [8].It's not clear why and how honor is related to reputation.
We agree and have removed mention of reputation from the introduction, as we now feel that it is tangential to our main points (pages 3-4).
The term "moral conventions" and its relevance to the argument is not explained well."This perspective allows self-reliance to be one of many means of demonstrating strength, with preference shaped by moral conventions [25,28].Moral conventions specify the qualities that indicate prestige or superiority, thereby governing how honor relates to those qualities." We apologize for the lack of clarity.We elaborate on this point further (page 5).We also changed "moral conventions" to "moral values" to make our wording consistent with other parts of the paper and avoid potential confusion.Study 2 and 3 are similar in their goals and methods.Therefore, I suggest rewriting them as study 2a and 2b.